China and Russia are winning the hypersonic missile race — can the US spend its way out of trouble?

After nearly two decades of focusing specifically on counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency warfare, the United States now finds itself in a difficult position. Despite having the largest defense budget on the globe, nation level competitors, specifically Russia and China, have begun fielding weapons technologies the United States simply can’t currently match. America, it would seem, allowed […]

China’s hypersonic missiles are a game changer — and they just started testing a new one

China’s DF-21D hypersonic anti-ship missile represents a significant enough potential threat to American Naval forces that its existence alone has forced the United States to employ multiple strategies aimed at extending the reach of carrier-based aircraft to keep its Nimitz and Ford class supercarriers outside of the missile’s operational range. The missile, which is capable […]

‘Maverick’ C-130 pilot goes inverted: Watch this massive plane do a loop

Okay, so technically speaking it’s the C-130’s newest civilian counterpart, the LM-100J, but it comes equipped with the very same Rolls-Royce AE 2100 D3 turboprop engines and six-blade Dowty R391 propellers that come standard on its military sibling, but its availability on the civilian market doesn’t make seeing such a massive aircraft doing a loop […]

Italy will not buy any more F-35s, may cancel existing order

Elisabetta Trenta assumed office as Italy’s Minister of Defense on June 1 of this year, and has already set about making changed to the nation’s military posture in keeping with her party’s populist tone. First, she announced a reduction in Italian troop counts in Afghanistan (dropping from 900 to 700) and on Friday, she announced […]

Five US military aircraft already being developed for future wars

The United States has spent years touting the Lockheed Martin sourced F-35 as the most advanced combat aircraft ever devised — which resulted in some ruffled feathers when Lockheed pitched an F-35/F-22 hybrid fighter it claimed would be superior to the incredibly expensive (and perpetually troubled) F-35 program. The thing is, despite being chock-full of […]

Lockheed Martin awarded $928 million to help US catch up in hypersonic missile race

Every so often, a new kind of weapon comes along that fundamentally shifts the way humans conduct warfare: bows extended the range of the battlefield, airplanes created air support, and the atomic bomb made “total war” too terrible to conduct with the regularity of conventional warfare. Increasingly, hypersonic missile platforms are beginning to look like […]